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January 2022 February 2022

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Tuesday 8th February 2022
08:20 GMT

  Yesterday morning was nice and sunny, but outdoors it still felt very chilly. By the afternoon it had warmed up to 9° C, and it didn't feel so bad. The sunshine/sunny spells continued beyond  the 1pm cut off in the forecasts, and the last sunny spells must have been around 3pm.
a sunny day (with luck)
  There is a mixture of clouds in the sky at the moment, but the sun is managing to squeeze a few rays through a gap as I write this. If the latest revision to the forecast turns out to match reality then there should be sunny spells for every hour of daylight except for 3pm. This morning I reckon it is closer to 9° C than the predicted 10° C. By 2pm it should be 13° C, and that could feel nice in the sunny spells, although the wind may be gusty enough to take the edge off it. Tomorrow could be nearly as warm, 12° C, but it may well be a grey day with rain after sunset.

  Yesterday was a successful day even if I didn't really achieve much. As I mentioned yesterday, one of the things I wanted to do yesterday was to go shopping in Tesco. It was useful on two counts. The most obvious was to buy new supplies of food. The less obvious was that it was a chance to "taste" the weather. It was bright, but it seemed to feel very chilly, and that put me off going for a walk in the park later.

  My intention, when going to Tesco was to buy only sensible stuff, and on the whole, that is what I did. I did buy a few things that are not ideal, like crisps, but I resisted having any yesterday, and I hope to save them for some sort of special occasion....or something like that. After succeeding in my reduced eating on Sunday, where I just had breakfast and a light dinner, I embarked on a plan I mentioned recently, or cutting my food intake in two.

  Yesterday I had just 1.5 bowls of noodles for breakfast. I was going to have just one, but I had two small (60gm) packets of "curry" flavoured noodles, and they are pretty horrible. I discarded the curry soup base packet, and added half the noodles to a better flavoured pack of instant noodles. I hardly noticed a lack of taste because of the added noodles. For my lunch I had just one can of soup-like Irish stew. That Irish stew is a good eat, and it's sugar content is very low.

  The one bit of hard work I did yesterday was some laundry. It was going to be just a couple of t-shirts (one white, and the other blue) plus a light blue pair of underpants. I also wanted to wash a hand towel from the kitchen. I decided that the hand towel should be washed separately because, to use a word popular with Jodie, "minging" ! My idea was that after washing that towel in bio detergent I would rinse it once or two before putting it in with the rinsing of the t-shirts. It was a fine idea only spoiled by the fact that the towel needed loads of rinsing before the rinse water started to approach getting clear. I stopped and started that job a few times before I got everything hanging up to dry.

  That leaves quite a few hours undescribed, and many of them were filled in by reading. It would actually be after dinner and a bit of TV that I read the last page of the book. Today I start reading a new book - Isaac Asimov's "Enigma". My dinner was also a very safe, and rather good meal. It was two skinless/boneless chicken thighs that I diced before cooking them in chicken stock and other spices before adding a lot of cabbage, and giving it another 9 minutes in the microwave. It was surprisingly good.

  As I mentioned above, I watched a bit of TV before going to bed to finish reading my book. It was about 9pm when I finished the book. I turned out the light, turned over, and.....nothing happened. It seemed I wasn't ready for sleep, and so I got up again, and did a bit of research. By chance I stumbled on something interesting.
a
                                      possible gig to go to
  I like Lord Algea, but I have only seen them cramped in the corner of a pub. It would be great to see them on a big stage with (hopefully) some good lighting. The last time I went to The Underword, in Camden, was to see Kayak, and it was a great event. Kayak, as I think I mentioned last week, are back in London in May, but when I checked the venue, the Islington Halls they said they were doing the full Covid passport rigmarole, and that put me right off (as well as the ticket price). The Underworld say they have no covid restrictions. The only things for me to overcome are to have the energy and inclination to go out late, and to be able to travel on the tube without a mask.

flower
                                      basket oneflower
                                      basket two

  Before coming to the subject of sleep, here's a couple of snaps of the baskets hanging on the fence in my back garden. It looks like I will very soon get some colour in my back garden. I must admit I can't remember what I put in these baskets, but I think it was a mix of dwarf and full sized crocuses, and dwarf tulips. You might notice in the top picture that one plant seems to have forced it's way through the plastic liner, and is growing out of the right hand side of the basket.
blue
                                          sky at gone 2pm
  This is how the sky looked at 2pm yesterday - a full hour after the weather forecast's curfew of 1pm. It was still almost this good at 3pm if I recall correctly. You might also note how the sun is hitting the back fence. It is going to take at least another month before the sun is high enough to reach the bottom of the fence.

  Back to the story of sleeping - or lack of it. While I was up, and doing research on the internet, I had a couple of large whiskies. I was back in bed at about 11.30pm, and I was probably asleep before midnight. I seemed to wake up a lot in the night, and it was one of those occasions where you only realise that you have been sleeping when waking up again. I can remember a few times when I thought I would never get back to sleep again, and then notice a couple of hours had passed on the clock. At 7am it seemed it was time to get up. Maybe the days now getting longer have reduced my appetite for sleep to less than 8 hours now.

  This morning, thanks to how I controlled my eating, my blood glucose has dropped to a low not seen in years. It was 7.2mmol/l - down from 7.3mmol/l yesterday morning. The interesting thing about 7.2mmol/l is that it is considered the upper limit for non diabetics, although the way it is measured has to follow protocols that I didn't. If I can do today, what I did yesterday, I might even get it a bit lower still.

  As I write these words the sky seems to be full of clouds, and the sun is nowhere to be seen. Assuming it brightens up again, I think I want to go for a walk in the park today. That could either help my blood glucose drop a bit extra, or I could be so hungry after a 3+ mile walk that I will come home and spoil everything. If I don't go for a walk I might possibly do some gardening instead. I have to admit that I really do need to do some gardening of I want my garden to look anywhere near what I dream of it looking like.
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